`Proficiscere, anima Christiana`: Gerontius and German mysticism

‘Proficiscere, anima Christiana’: Gerontius and German mysticism
Thomson, A. J. (2013). ‘Proficiscere, anima Christiana’: Gerontius and German mysticism. Journal of the Royal
Musical Association, 138 (2), 275-312. DOI: 10.1080/02690403.2013.830475
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Download date:16. Jun. 2017
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Author(s):
Aidan Thomson
Article title: ‘Proficiscere, anima Christiana’: Gerontius and German Mysticism
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830475
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Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 2013
Vol. 138, No. 2, 275312, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02690403.2013.830475
‘Proficiscere, anima Christiana’:
Gerontius and German Mysticism
AIDAN THOMSON
5
Gerontius in Germany
10
15
20
25
THE première of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius, which took place in Birmingham
Town Hall on 3 October 1900, was, famously, a disaster. A combination of events the death on 11 June of the chorus master, Charles Swinnerton Heap, his
replacement by a musically unsympathetic veteran, W. C. Stockley, and the absence
of printed parts before August conspired to aggravate the rehearsal of a score that,
by the standards of contemporary English oratorio, was particularly demanding.1
The result was a performance which prompted Elgar’s friend Rosa Burley to
comment that ‘the chorus did not know the parts they were trying to sing’, and in
which one of the soloists, Harry Plunket Greene, sang a semitone out of tune from
the Angel of the Agony scene to the end of the work.2 There was no lack of sympathy
for Elgar among the British press, many of whom were as quick to praise the new
work as they were to censure its performance. But the effect of the Birmingham
debacle was immediate, for Sir August Manns cancelled a performance scheduled to
take place at the Crystal Palace on 27 October. Gerontius was not performed again in
Britain, at least in full, until 11 September 1902, almost two years after the première,
as part of the Three Choirs Festival at Worcester.3
By then, the work had enjoyed success elsewhere. A performance of Gerontius by the
Civic Music Society in Düsseldorf on 19 December 1901 won Elgar much critical
acclaim and, in the minds of some local German critics, established him as the leading
British composer of his generation.4 This led to a second Düsseldorf performance on
E-mail: [email protected]
1
Lewis Foreman, ‘Elgar and Gerontius: The Early Performances’, The Best of Me: A Gerontius Centenary
Companion, ed. Geoffrey Hodgkins (Rickmansworth, 1999), 162235 (pp. 168, 173).
2
Rosa Burley and Frank C. Carruthers, Edward Elgar: The Record of a Friendship (London, 1972), 142,
quoted in Jerrold Northrop Moore, Edward Elgar: A Creative Life (2nd edn, Oxford, 1987), 331;
Mrs Richard Powell [Dora Penny], ‘The First Performance of ‘‘Gerontius’’’, Musical Times, 100 (1959), 789.
3
Foreman, ‘Elgar and Gerontius’, 182, 1867. There was a performance in Worcester on 9 May 1901
under the composer, but it did not include the Demons’ Chorus. For some of the British critical
reaction to the première, see Moore, Edward Elgar, 3314, and ‘The Birmingham Première’, The Best
of Me, ed. Hodgkins, 12355.
4
See the reviews in the Düsseldorfer Zeitung and Düsseldorfer Volksblatt, trans. David Mason, quoted in
Foreman, ‘Elgar and Gerontius’, 192, 198.
# The Royal Musical Association
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35
40
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AIDAN THOMSON
19 May 1902, as part of the Lower Rhine Music Festival, after which Richard Strauss
famously toasted Elgar as the ‘first English progressivist’.5 Lewis Foreman is surely correct
when he writes that while these two performances had not ‘single-handedly demonstrated
the stature of Gerontius [. . .] there [could] be no doubt of the impact of the music at
Düsseldorf, or the influence it had in both countries’.6 In Britain, Gerontius became a
pillar of the main choral festivals almost overnight: the work was performed 14 times in
England and Scotland in 1903 alone, and its popularity with audiences was rivalled only
by Handel’s Messiah and Mendelssohn’s Elijah.7 Admittedly, this popularity was not
universal. A number of Protestant clergymen felt that the Catholic theology underpinning Cardinal Newman’s poem rendered it unsuitable for performance in Anglican
cathedrals; thus Gerontius was heard in Worcester Cathedral only with textual alterations,
and not at all in Gloucester Cathedral until 1910.8 For conservative music critics, the
Wagnerian idiom of Elgar’s score, a new departure for English oratorio, was no less
problematic. In fin de sie`cle Britain, Wagner had become associated with the so-called
‘decadent’ movement, which had fallen into disrepute following the conviction of
Oscar Wilde in 1895; for the fact that Gerontius owed as much as it did to Parsifal a
work whose frequently febrile atmosphere made it in some ways the quintessential
decadent music drama permitted some critics to view Elgar’s work as morally suspect.9
5
6
7
8
9
Foreman, ‘Elgar and Gerontius’, 205.
Ibid., 188.
Ibid., 187; Herbert Thompson, ‘The English Autumn Provincial Festivals’, Zeitschrift der
Internationalen Musikgesellschaft (hereafter ZIMG), 5/4 (January 1904), 173. Thompson noted the
near identity of the attendance figures for the three oratorios at the 1903 Three Choirs Festival at
Hereford: 2,130 for Gerontius, 2,129 for Elijah and 2,128 for Messiah.
Robert Anderson, Elgar (London, 1993), 54; Byron Adams, ‘Elgar’s Later Oratorios: Roman
Catholicism, Decadence and the Wagnerian Dialectic of Shame and Grace’, The Cambridge
Companion to Elgar, ed. Daniel M. Grimley and Julian Rushton (Cambridge, 2004), 81105 (p. 87,
n. 26); Charles Edward McGuire, ‘Measure of a Man: Catechizing Elgar’s Catholic Avatars’, Edward
Elgar and his World, ed. Byron Adams (Princeton, NJ, 2007), 337 (p. 6). The clerics had support
from conservative critics like Charles Maclean, according to whom ‘a modern poem with its direct
imagery does introduce and accentuate feelings of theological difference, which ancient words in
Latin, become almost a formula, do not; and if the clergy are in earnest, they could not possibly allow
the drama of ‘‘Gerontius’’ to be acted in its ipsissima verba before their eyes and giving the sanction of
the Protestant church-building for which they are in trust’. See Charles Maclean, ‘Notizien’,
‘Worcester’, ZIMG, 4/1 (October 1902), 312 (p. 31). For more on the often mixed reception of
Catholic oratorios, and Gerontius in particular, in Britain, see Maria McHale, ‘A Singing People:
English Vocal Music and Nationalist Debate, 18801920’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of London,
2003), Chapter 2 (‘Oratorio and the Choral Tradition’), 10260, esp. pp. 12542.
Emma Sutton, Aubrey Beardsley and British Wagnerism in the 1890s (Oxford, 2002); Adams, ‘Elgar’s
Later Oratorios’, esp. pp. 8393. The connection between Parsifal and Gerontius has long been
recognized (Adams, ‘Elgar’s Later Oratorios’, 867); the pejorative form that this could take is
exemplified by Ernest Walker, who claimed that Gerontius’s profession of faith, ‘though sincere,
nevertheless suggest[s] an atmosphere of artificial flowers’, a choice of metaphor that hints at Act 2 of
Parsifal. See Ernest Walker, A History of Music in England (Oxford, 1907), 3067, quoted in Aidan J.
Thomson, ‘Elgar’s Critical Critics’, Edward Elgar and his World, ed. Adams, 193222 (p. 213).
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But for the most part the incorporation of Gerontius into the English oratorio canon
was unproblematic.
While the Düsseldorf performances have become central to the post-compositional
history of Gerontius, their centrality is ultimately ancillary; it is less significant that
the performances themselves were successful (in the first Düsseldorf concert, Antonie
Beel, who sang the Angel, attracted some adverse criticism) than that the positive
critical evaluation of the work by German critics prompted hitherto sceptical British
audiences to embrace the piece wholeheartedly. In other words, the critical success in
Germany may be portrayed as having served as a means to an end (the incorporation
of Gerontius into the English choral repertory) rather than as being interesting in its
own right. Yet this remarkably Anglocentric perspective leaves much unsaid. What
caused German audiences, and therefore presumably German critics, to respond so
positively to Gerontius? In particular, how did German critics react to the religiosity
of Elgar’s piece, especially if we consider that Parsifal had yet to be performed
outside Bayreuth?
To date, the most significant attempt to address this question, in relation to
German-speaking lands if not to Germany itself, has been Sandra McColl’s
appraisal of the critical reaction to the Viennese première of Gerontius on 16
November 1905. Many Viennese critics were unimpressed by Newman’s text,
whether on theological or dramatic grounds (or both), but most were positive
about Elgar’s music, their reservations being limited to the opening of Part II,
which some felt lacked the necessary other-worldliness, and the Demons’
Chorus, which was thought too tame.10 On the other hand, it is reasonable to
assume that these critics were not starting from a blank slate; they might well
have been familiar with the work from one or other of the Düsseldorf
performances, or at least with the response to them, and might even have seen
the (by now) published score. For this reason it makes sense to consider earlier
German responses to Gerontius, and to Elgar in general, particularly those in
explicitly musical journals, which had the space to examine the subject in depth.
Foremost among these are the articles written by Max Hehemann for Die Musik
10
Sandra McColl, ‘Gerontius in the City of Dreams: Newman, Elgar, and the Viennese Critics’,
International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, 32 (2001), 4764. The critics who
admired the work most were Richard Wallaschek in Die Zeit, who saw ‘the national music [. . .] of
the German people as potentially lying in the massed choral-orchestral festivals that were a feature
of German life at the time’ (quoted in McColl, op. cit., 48), and Maximilian Muntz in the
Deutsche Zeitung (a Christian Socialist paper). Those who disliked it most were Hedwig von
Friedländer-Abel in the Montags-Revue, who found the text ‘saccharine’ and Elgar’s setting of it
‘artificial, cluttered, contrivedly simple’ (quoted in McColl, op. cit., 54, 60); David Josef Bach in
the Arbeiter-Zeitung (a socialist paper); and Robert Hirschfeld in the Wiener Abendpost, who
thought Elgar’s setting too operatic for a religious work. The leading Viennese critics, Julius
Korngold (Neue Freie Presse) and Max Kalbeck (Neues Wiener Tagblatt), were moderately proand anti-Gerontius respectively; both disliked the text but, for the most part, praised Elgar’s
setting of it.
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AIDAN THOMSON
(1903) and Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (1905), by Otto Neitzel for Signale für die
musikalische Welt (1902), and by Fritz Volbach for the Allgemeine Musikzeitung
(1904). To these may also be added a later, slightly longer article that Volbach
wrote in 1907 for the Catholic journal Hochland, partly because the views he
expresses therein about Gerontius are unlikely to differ greatly from those that
he held three years earlier, and partly because the theological parallels he draws
are somewhat more detailed than the reviews in the purely musical periodicals a reflection, perhaps, of his awareness of Hochland’s readership.11 It is hard to be
sure how representative these articles were of wider critical opinion in Germany,
but the fact that in most cases they appeared several years after the Düsseldorf
performances of Gerontius would seem to indicate enduring interest either in the
work or in its composer.
An examination of these writers’ critical reactions to Gerontius reveals two
recurring features: an attempt to connect Elgar’s work with Richard Strauss’s
tone poem Tod und Verklärung (1890) and an interest in the work’s relationship
to mysticism. The connection with Strauss is hardly surprising, given the aftermath
of the second Düsseldorf concert, but the significance of that event should not be
underestimated; as a contemporary composer whose pre-eminence was taken for
granted in Britain by liberal and conservative critics alike, Strauss’s words carried a
great deal of authority in the right circles.12 More important, however, is the fact
that, partly as a consequence of Germany’s musical hegemony in the late nineteenth
century, and of the transcendental aesthetics associated with it, great German music
had become synonymous in the minds of many German and British critics with
11
12
Max Hehemann, ‘Edward Elgar’, Die Musik, 2/7 (January 1903), 1525, and idem, ‘Edward
Elgar’, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 72/40 (27 September 1905), 7602; Otto Neitzel, ‘Zwei
‘‘Urneuheiten’’: Elgar’s ‘‘Traum des Gerontius’’ und Reznicek’s ‘‘Till Eulenspiegel’’’, Signale für
die musikalische Welt, 60/10 (29 January 1902), 1458; Fritz Volbach, ‘Die ‘‘Apostel’’ von
Edward Elgar’, Allgemeine Musikzeitung, 31/51 (16 December 1904), 84950, continued in
Allgemeine Musikzeitung, 31/52 (23 December 1904), 86970, and idem, ‘Edward Elgar’,
Hochland, 5/1 (December 1907), 31621. Volbach’s perspective may also have been
consolidated by his personal friendship and correspondence with Elgar; see Walther Volbach,
‘Edward and Fritz Volbach’, Musical Opinion, 60 (1937), 8702. For more on these critics, see
Aidan J. Thomson, ‘Elgar in German Criticism’, The Cambridge Companion to Elgar, ed.
Grimley and Rushton, 20413.
Among early twentieth-century British critics, Alfred Kalisch described Strauss as ‘the greatest,
if not the only great force in the music of to-day, and destined to have a permanent and
prominent place in the history of music’, while Maclean, much though he was appalled by
the plots of both Salome and Der Rosenkavalier, described Strauss as the ‘greatest of
living musicians’. See Alf[red] K[alisch], ‘Musikberichte’, ‘London’, ZIMG, 4/10 (July 1903),
6267 (p. 627); Charles Maclean, ‘Music and Morals’, ZIMG, 8/12 (September 1907), 4614
(p. 462); and C[harles] M[aclean], ‘London Notes’, ZIMG, 14/5 (February 1913), 1389
(p. 138).
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great music in general.13 For Elgar to be endorsed by the arbiters, as it were, of
universal musical taste, was for him to be assigned a place in ‘universal’ (for which
read ‘German’) music history; for Gerontius to become a choral classic alongside
Elijah was thus no less than it merited. But we should also note Hehemann’s remark
that ‘since Professor Buths performed the ‘‘Dream of Gerontius’’ in the German
language for the first time in Düsseldorf on 19th December 1901, Elgar is entitled to
live as one of us’.14 For Hehemann, at least, Elgar’s universality was predicated in his
Germanness.
The specific connection with Tod und Verklärung, however, is more intriguing.
Although Elgar may have seen the score of Strauss’s tone poem by the time he wrote
Gerontius, he certainly did not hear it in concert until June 1902, and never gave any
indication subsequently that he had been influenced by it.15 Nevertheless, the
superficial similarity between the two pieces both begin with the death of a mortal
and trace the spiritual journey of a soul prompted some critics to compare them.
For instance, Neitzel, the music critic of the Kölnische Zeitung, was certain that
Gerontius was
called into life directly or indirectly by the example of Richard Strauss, a proof of how
widely this live wire of new musical ideas [. . .] is stirring up the musical water. Certainly
115
13
14
15
A blatant example of this point of view can be found in Hugo Riemann, ‘Schluss’, ‘Musikgeschichte’,
§222 of Das goldene Buch der Musik, ed. Karl Grunsky et al. (Berlin and Stuttgart, 1900); note
particularly Riemann’s implicit universalizing in his references to ‘real art’ and ‘for all countries’:
‘The complete picture of the musical world at the end of the century shows that Germany’s musical
supremacy over all countries that cultivate real art continues with unabated strength. [. . .] For all
countries, the ‘‘greats’’ are German masters: Bach, Handel, Gluck, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven,
Schubert, Weber, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Wagner and Brahms. For one or other of one’s own
nationality to be equated with these greats is the highest thing to which the pride of other nations
aspires’ (‘Das Gesamtbild der musikalischen Welt am Schlusse des Jahrhunderts zeigt die noch mit
ungeschwächter Kraft fortdauernde musikalische Suprematie Deutschlands über alle Länder, welche
überhaupt die rechte Kunst pflegen. [. . .] die ‘‘Grossen’’ sind für alle Lande die deutschen Meister
Bach, Händel, Gluck, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Weber, Mendelssohn, Schumann,
Wagner und Brahms. Diesen Grossen einen oder den andern der eigenen Nationalität
gleichzustellen, ist das Höchste, wozu sich der Stolz der anderen Nationen erhebt’). Hubert Parry’s
Studies of Great Composers (7th edn, London, 1902) focuses on almost exactly the same composers as
Riemann; of these, only Gluck and Brahms are not the subjects of individual chapters, and Palestrina
is the sole non-German/Austrian.
Hehemann, ‘Edward Elgar’ (1905), 761: ‘Seitdem Prof. Buths in Düsseldorf am 19. Dez. 1901 den
‘‘Traum des Gerontius’’ zum ersten Male in deutscher Sprache aufführte, hat Elgar Heimatrecht bei
uns’ (italics added).
Peter Dennison, ‘Elgar’s Musical Apprenticeship’, Elgar Studies, ed. Raymond Monk (Aldershot,
1990), 134 (pp. 13, 27). In an interview that appeared in Chicago Inter-Ocean on 7 April 1907,
Elgar expressed his admiration for Strauss’s tone poems, but comments about Tod are conspicuous
by their absence: ‘‘‘Don Juan’’ is the greatest masterpiece of the present, and his ‘‘Heldenleben’’ and
‘‘Zarathustra’’ I find almost as inspiring’ (quoted in Moore, Edward Elgar, 511).
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Elgar’s oratorio further extends the range of ideas and circles of emotions that Strauss has
struck in his tone poem Tod und Verklärung.16
120
125
130
135
Neitzel felt that Gerontius formed part of the post-Parsifalian transfigurative Zeitgeist
on account of its subject matter: following the Demons’ Chorus, Part II of the
oratorio resembled ‘the manner of the third act of Parsifal, only Gerontius is spared
the snake-bite of remorse and the neglected good deeds’.17
But Neitzel was also conscious of how the oratorio’s distinctively Catholic qualities
differed from Tod und Verklärung, nowhere more so than in how Strauss and Elgar
(or at least Newman) dealt with the deaths of their respective protagonists. In Tod,
dying is a simple ‘solemn but short entry into Elysium’, the inevitability of which
almost suggests secular predestination.18 We may infer from this that the hero of Tod
has no doubts about his destination: his earthly actions have spoken for themselves;
he has no higher authority before which to answer; thus a short but resounding
‘arrival’ in the traditionally triumphant key of C major announces his arrival into the
pantheon of the immortals.19 In Gerontius, however, dying is painful, protracted
and, above all, plagued with uncertainty about the Soul’s future. Although Newman
‘has guided his hero’s last moments completely into the influence of the Catholic
faith’, that faith continues to vacillate: on the one hand, Gerontius ‘summons up
renewed powers of resistance from the intercession, which to him is a confirmation
of the truth of his faith’; on the other, ‘under the influence of the evil spirit appearing
to him, he is shaken by a renewed wild fear of death’.20 Gerontius’s utterances,
16
17
18
19
20
Neitzel, ‘Zwei ‘‘Urneuheiten’’’, 145: ‘[. . .] dass sie unmittel- oder mittelbar durch Richard Strauß’
Vorgang in’s [sic] Leben gerufen wurden, ein Beweis, wie weit dieser Hecht im musikalischen
Karpfenteich [. . .] die musikalischen Wasser aufrührt. Und zwar spinnt das Elgar’sche [sic]
Oratorium die Gedanken- und Empfindenskreise weiter, die Strauss in seiner Tondichtung ‘‘Tod
und Verklärung’’ angeschlagen hat.’
Ibid., 146: ‘eine Art ‘‘Parsifal’’ dritter Act, nur daß dem Gerontius der Schlangenbiß der Reue und
der versäumten guten Thaten erspart bleibt’.
Ibid, 145: ‘feierlichen aber kurzen Einzug in’s [sic] Elysium’. Such predestination was also congruent
with nineteenth-century theories of heroism, notably that outlined by Thomas Carlyle, for whom
‘Man [was] heaven-born; not the thrall of Circumstances, of Necessity, but the victorious subduer
thereof’; see Thomas Carlyle, ‘Boswell’s Life of Johnson’ (1832), Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, 5
vols., The Works of Thomas Carlyle (Centenary Edition), ed. Henry Duff Traill, 2630 (London,
18969), iii (1898), 90, quoted in introduction to Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and
the Heroic in History, notes and introduction by Michael K. Goldberg; text established by Michael K.
Goldberg, Joel J. Brattin and Mark Engel (Berkeley, CA, 1993), xxxivxxxv.
Strauss may have envisaged himself as the hero of Tod. In a letter to Friedrich von Hausegger in 1895
he wrote that he aimed ‘to represent the death of a person who had striven for the highest artistic
goals, therefore very probably an artist’; see Michael Kennedy, Strauss Tone Poems, BBC Music
Guide (London, 1984), 22. Moreover, Strauss quotes Tod at several points in Ein Heldenleben.
Neitzel, ‘Zwei ‘‘Urneuheiten’’’, 1456: ‘hat Newman die letzten Augenblicke seines Helden völlig in
die Bannkreise des katholischen Glaubens hinübergeführt’; ‘schöpft er aus der Fürbitte, die ihm eine
Bestätigung seiner Glaubenstreue ist, erneute Widerstandskraft’; ‘als ihn, unter dem Einfluß des ihm
erscheinenden bösen Geistes, erneute wilde Todesfurcht durchschüttelt’.
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however, form only part of the dramatic argument, for his struggle against death,
expressed in the declamation of music drama, takes place at the same moment as the
prayers of his friends, sung by the chorus and semi-chorus, ‘strive to free him’ (‘zu
befreien trachtet’) from this evil spirit. These friends are thus active participants
in the drama, not just commentators. Theirs is the confirmative voice of authority in
the debate raging inside the Soul’s head; their stile antico singing provides the
certainty of faith that the dying Gerontius requires. Nevertheless, the work ends in
the ambiguity of purgatory, not the certainty of heaven. It is a far cry from the heroic
affirmation of Tod.
The difference between Elgar’s and Strauss’s perspectives of death reflected the
difference in their spiritual world-views. As Hehemann put it, ‘Strauss’s ideal is
striven for in this life’, whereas
with Elgar, the music even more than the poetry expresses the desire for the hereafter, and
the prayer which the friends of Gerontius dedicate to his departed soul is not a remorseful
melancholic plea, but rather a song of triumph for one who has overcome life, and
through the gate of death has arrived at everlasting joy.21
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But, despite drawing this distinction between Elgarian spirituality and Straussian
materialism, Hehemann also acknowledged that the subject matter of Gerontius was
‘generally human material’ (‘allgemein menschlichen Stoff’), a remark that echoed
Elgar’s own comment that he imagined Gerontius ‘to be a man like us, not a Priest
or a Saint, but a sinner, a repentant one of course but still no end of a worldly man in
his life, & now brought to book’. Elgar’s work may have possessed a ‘peculiar
Catholic mysticism’ (‘eigenartige katholische Mystik’), but it also contained human
truths no less than did Strauss’s.22
While the similarities between Gerontius and Tod und Verklärung meant that
they could both form part of a wider post-Parsifalian discourse on death and
transfiguration in Germany, the differences between the two works are considerable
on account of the theology that lay at the heart of Elgar’s work. In particular,
Hehemann’s approving reference to Elgar’s ‘peculiar Catholic mysticism’ is echoed
by both Neitzel and Volbach in their accounts of the piece. In the remainder of this
article, I shall discuss what Hehemann and his fellow critics may have understood by
‘mysticism’, why it had become an important creative stimulus for artists in late
nineteenth-century Germany, and how it manifests itself musically in Gerontius.
Following a consideration of the tonal planning of the work, and, especially, Elgar’s
21
22
Hehemann, ‘Edward Elgar’ (1903), 17: ‘Bei Strauss wird das Ideal in diesem Leben erstrebt’; ‘bei
Elgar spricht die Musik noch mehr wie die Dichtung das Verlangen nach dem Jenseits aus, und das
Gebet, das die Freunde des Gerontius seiner abgeschiedenen Seele widmen, ist keine zerknirschte
wehmutsvolle Bitte, sondern eher ein Triumphgesang für den, der das Leben überwunden hat und
durch die Todespforte eingeht zur ewigen Freude’.
Ibid.; letter to August Jaeger, 28 August 1900, in Elgar and his Publishers: Letters of a Creative Life,
ed. Jerrold Northrop Moore, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1987), i: 18851903, 228.
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175
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development of the leitmotif associated with the words ‘Novissima hora est’ (‘It is the
last hour’), I suggest that Gerontius may best be classified as an epic, rather than a
dramatic, oratorio, on account of the fact that the structure of the work suggests two
narratives taking place simultaneously and instantaneously a collapsing of time that
is in keeping with the mystical scenario of the piece as a whole.
Mysticism and Gerontius
180
185
190
195
200
As Roy Pascal has observed, the second half of the nineteenth century in Germany
saw a ‘decline in the intellectual authority of the church [that] was more thorough
[. . .] than elsewhere in Europe and America’. Ironically, this was partly the
consequence of a culturally Protestant tradition of critical inquiry that, both in
philosophy and in science, had increasingly stripped Christianity of its claims to
universal truth. By the era of the Wilhelmine Reich, alternatives to traditional
religion had begun to emerge. In some cases, these were explicitly secular
organizations, such as the League of Freethinkers, founded in 1881, or the
Komitee Konfessionslos, which favoured church disestablishment and the freeing of
teachers from religious duties.23 In others, the alternatives took the form of religious
systems that combined Christianity with Darwinism, nationalism and other
contemporary ideologies (including anti-Semitism), as part of a reaction against
modern materialism; these included esoteric movements such as theosophy and
anthroposophy (founded by Rudolf Steiner), and völkisch movements with racist
overtones such as ariosophy and the Christian-Germanic ‘religion’ pioneered by the
eccentric theologian Paul de Lagarde.24 The scepticism, scientism and rationalism
that characterized nineteenth-century German cultural Protestantism thus provoked
its own reaction: a longing for salvation (‘Erlösung’) in a transcendental spirituality
that rejected modern materialism. And, as Nietzsche put it, ‘when scepticism meets
with longing, mysticism is born’.25
‘Mysticism’ or at least that which was described as ‘mystical’ had several
meanings in late nineteenth-century Germany. Applied loosely, the word could
connote a sense of spirituality or religiosity that was not tied to any particular creed
(in other words, ‘scepticism [met] with longing’), and which bypassed rationality
and conscious thought. As Eduard von Hartmann commented, in a much-reprinted
volume, ‘the essence of the mystical should be understood as filling consciousness
23
24
25
Roy Pascal, From Naturalism to Expressionism: German Literature and Society 18801918 (London,
1973), 1623, 166.
For more on Lagarde, see George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the
Third Reich (New York, 1964), 319, and Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the
Rise of the Germanic Ideology (Berkeley, CA, 1974), 3552. For an overview of the social, cultural,
intellectual and artistic reaction to bourgeois modernity in Wilhelmine Germany, see Hagen Schulze,
Germany: A New History, trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider (Cambridge, MA, 1998), 17683.
Quoted in Pascal, From Naturalism to Expressionism, 171.
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with content (feeling, thought, desiring) through the spontaneous appearance of the
same from the unconscious’.26 But ‘mysticism’ was more than simply irrational
feeling; indeed, within academic theology it had a very specific meaning. This
meaning involved the collapse of subjectobject (or innerouter) dualities, to reveal
a sense of oneness with the deity. It thus has much in common with Hartmann’s
definition, but with the important difference that it makes explicit the relationship
between the individual and God. As Wilhelm Windelband explained:
The conceptual principle of mysticism is that mankind appears in his identity with the
Godhead. Mankind as micro-deity is the disclosure of all mystery. The soul is God, so far
as it recognizes Him it recognizes Him so far as it is God. But this understanding is an
‘inexpressible vision’ [. . .]. This idealistic pantheism, which dissolves the outside world
into the inner, and the inner world into a blessed vision of God, is the basis of the
character of German mysticism.27
210
215
220
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Windelband’s reference to ‘the character of German mysticism’ reflects the extent
to which contemporary mysticism had deep medieval roots. The second half of the
nineteenth century saw a revival of interest in the works of the fourteenth-century
Rhenish mystics Meister Eckhart (12601328) and Heinrich Suso (12951366),
whose works appeared in new editions and attracted considerable scholarly
attention.28 This Rhenish mysticism was characterized by the idea of at-oneness
with God, something that was achieved, in Eckhart’s theory, by a process called
‘Gelassenheit’ (‘detachment’). ‘Gelassenheit’ was effectively a renunciation of the self
(in the sense of what one is, rather than what one has): one emptied one’s soul so that
26
27
28
Eduard von Hartmann, Philosophie des Unbewußten, 8th edn, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1878), i:
Phänomenologie des Unbewußten, 314, quoted in Jacob Mühlethaler, Die Mystik bei Schopenhauer
(Berlin, 1910), 80: ‘Das Wesen des Mystischen ist zu begreifen als Erfüllung des Bewußtseins mit
einem Inhalt (Gefühl, Gedanke, Begehrung) durch unwillkürliches Auftauchen desselben aus dem
Unbewußten.’
Wilhelm Windelband, Geschichte der neuern Philosophie, 4th edn, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1907), i, §5,
‘Die deutsche Mystik’, quoted in Mühlethaler, Die Mystik bei Schopenhauer, 79: ‘[. . .] erscheint
der Mensch in seiner Identität mit der Gottheit als das Erkenntnisprinzip des Mystizismus. Der
Mensch als Mikrotheos ist die Enthüllung aller Rätsel. Die Seele ist soweit Gott, als sie ihn
erkennt sie erkennt ihn soweit, als sie Gott ist. Dies Erkennen aber ist ein ‘‘unaussprechliches
Anschauen’’ [. . .]. Dieser idealistische Pantheismus, der die äußere Welt in die innere und die
innere Welt in eine selige Gottesanschauung auflöst, ist der Grundcharakter der deutschen
Mystik.’
Pascal, From Naturalism to Expressionism, 171. The first modern edition of either mystic’s work was
Deutsche Mystiker des vierzehnten Jahrhunderts, ed. Franz Pfeiffer, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 184557), ii:
Meister Eckhart. Other editions included Heinrich Suso Denifle, Die deutschen Schriften des Seligen
Heinrich Seuse aus dem Prediger Ordern (Munich, 1880); Wilhelm Preger, Ältere und neuere Mystik in
der ersten Hälfte des XIV. Jahrhunderts: Heinrich Suso (Leipzig, 1881); Meister Eckhart und seine
Jünger: Ungedruckte Texte zur Geschichte der deutscher Mystik, ed. Franz Jostes (Freiburg, 1895); and
Meister Eckharts mystische Schriften, trans. Gustav Landauer (Berlin, 1903).
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225
230
235
240
245
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it might be filled by God.29 With the immanent presence of God in the soul, and
thus complete union between human and deity, the logical result of Eckhart’s theory
was the deification of the human being.30 However, as one of Eckhart’s forerunners,
Mechthild of Magdeburg (c.120782), observed, the perception of such a union
must occur in the knowing self, the re-emergence of which thus necessitated
the breaking of the mystical union, and therefore the loss of God’s presence. The
suffering that this entailed, Mechthild believed, enabled the mystic to empathize
with the suffering undergone by Christ (and by humanity in general), and thereby to
come into the presence of divine love again. Consequently, there was a constant
oscillation within the soul between the presence and non-presence of God, which,
over time, would synthesize into a realization of His omnipresence.31
The consequences of ‘Gelassenheit’ were multifold. For Eckhart’s contemporary
Marguerite Porete (d. 1310), the soul should aim to live without a ‘why’; this was a
reflection of a widespread belief, later adopted by Eckhart, that sin existed in the will
(i.e. the soul) rather than in the body. (Indeed, Marguerite believed that the will had
to be destroyed before mystical union with God was possible.)32 A still more
significant consequence was the view that with mystical union the Son of God was
constantly reborn in the soul, which Eckhart described as both ‘virgin and wife’.33
Since mystical union, by its very nature, was a constantly recurring process, the birth
of the Son was thus not a one-off event; indeed, since the Son, as part of the Trinity,
existed before the Creation, the soul, or at least the part of it that achieved mystical
union with God, must be similarly ‘uncreated’.34 In this way, not only did mystical
union go beyond normal human thought processes, but, at least in theory, it
29
30
31
32
33
34
Alain de Libera, Eckhart, Suso, Tauler, ou la divinisation de l’homme (Paris, 1996), 102, 111. Suso
took a similar position to Eckhart: for him there was a need to be ‘freed from the forms of creatures,
formed with Christ, and transformed in the Godhead’; the ‘goal of the truly detached person in all
things’ was to ‘sink away from the self, and with the self all things sink away’ (ibid., 11819; my
translations). See also Henry Suso, The Exemplar, with Two German Sermons, trans., ed. and with
introduction by Frank Tobin, preface by Bernard McGinn (New York, 1989), 1845, and Amy
Hollywood, The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete and Meister Eckhart
(Notre Dame, IN, 1995), 122ff.
Eckhart even implied this directly, claiming that the ‘breakthrough’ required to achieve union was a
transformation akin to transubstantiation; Suso challenged this position, arguing that however much
a human might share Christ’s humanity, no union with God could result in that human approaching
Christ’s divinity. See Libera, Eckhart, Suso, Tauler, 176, 182. Suso’s refutation of Eckhart’s position
appears in The Little Book of Truth, Chapter 4; see Suso, The Exemplar, ed. Tobin, 2930.
Hollywood, The Soul as Virgin Wife, 79, 845.
Ibid., 116, 278. Hollywood discusses the tradition of women identifying with the body more than
men did, including in their respective spiritualities. Following the trial and condemnation of Meister
Eckhart in 1328, the suffering body again became seen as essential as a means to accessing the divine;
see ibid., 75, 95, 101 and 206.
Ibid., 9.
Ibid., 138, 151.
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255
260
265
270
275
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occurred beyond time and space. In doing so, it denied the idea of the diachronic,
and of history itself.
The apparent paradoxes and contradictions inherent in mysticism for instance
the impossibility of being aware of one’s oneness with God because to be so aware
would be to deny that oneness, or the recurrence of events that by their nature
existed outside human concepts of time proved very attractive to late nineteenthcentury German intellectuals and artists who had become disillusioned with a
modernity that was underpinned by rationality and materialism. In many cases they
took their cue from Schopenhauer, who, in Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1818,
revised 1844), had proposed a means of transcending the destructive desires of
humanity, namely self-abnegating asceticism, that owed much to mystical thought albeit mystical thought in which he ‘replaced its religious centre with the idea of a
conscious life sustained by the transcendent irrational power of a metaphysical
‘‘will’’’.35 This secularization of mystical ideas allowed them to be used creatively by
early modernist writers who in some cases were non- or even anti-Christian, such as
Rainer Maria Rilke (in his Stundenbuch) and Stefan George, and by artists such as
Wassily Kandinsky, who, in his ‘Über das Geistige in der Kunst’, called for painters
to ‘adopt a mystical view of the world’s ‘‘inner reality’’’.36 Mysticism was thus not
only part of the reaction against modernity but also an essential ingredient of early
modernist art.
If mysticism could play an important role in the genesis of early modernist
literature and visual art, it almost goes without saying that it could also do so with
music, the artistic medium in which Schopenhauer’s aesthetic theories perhaps had
the most pervasive effect on account of their adoption by Wagner. In Book 3 of Die
Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Schopenhauer outlined how the purpose of great art
was to communicate universal, Platonic ideas, and how through aesthetic perception
and contemplation of these ideas an individual could be raised into a ‘pure, will-less,
painless, timeless subject of knowledge’.37 The highest of all art forms, Schopenhauer
argued, was music, because its non-representational character meant that it was ‘by
no means like the other arts, the copy of the Ideas, but the copy of the will itself, whose
objectivity the Ideas are’. Melody thus ‘records the most secret history of this
35
36
37
Andrew Weeks, German Mysticism from Hildegard of Bingen to Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Literary and
Intellectual History (Albany, NY, 1993), 230. Schopenhauer’s mystical thinking derived from, among
other sources, Buddhism, Eckhart and the sixteenth-/seventeenth-century mystic Jakob Boehme. See
also Gerard Mannion, Schopenhauer, Religion and Morality: The Humble Path to Ethics (Aldershot,
2003), 7780.
For examples of such mystically inspired work, see Weeks, German Mysticism, 2335, and Paul R.
Mendes Flohr, Divided Passions: Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of Modernity (Detroit, MI,
1991), 80. Other figures inspired by the ideas of mysticism besides Rilke, George and Kandinsky
included Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Gustav Klimt, Hermann Hesse, Gustav Landauer and Ernst
Bloch.
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, trans. Richard Burdon Haldane and John Kemp
(London, 1896), iii, §34, p. 231.
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280
285
290
295
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intellectually-enlightened will, pictures every excitement, every effort, every
movement of it, all that which the reason collects under the wide and negative
concept of feeling, and which it cannot apprehend further through its abstract
concepts’.38 More than literature or visual art, great music could portray an ideal
reality, not reducible to mere words, that transcended the material and the
temporal, in a way that is reminiscent of mystical unity.39 But, in yet another
paradox, the means by which music portrayed this reality necessarily required it to
unfold in ‘real’ time.
Consequently, despite Hehemann’s reference to the ‘peculiar Catholic
mysticism’ of Gerontius, it is reasonable to suppose that Elgar’s work formed
part of a wider contemporary discourse on the relationship between the human
(or temporal) and the divine (or, in non-theistic terms, the absolute). That it was
unusual for a British composer to participate in this discourse was something that
Hehemann was quick to acknowledge. In the same passage in which he
mentioned Elgar’s ‘peculiar Catholic mysticism’, he claimed that in Gerontius
‘Elgar’s nationality has, outwardly, left the least mark’.40 In his 1905 article he
added:
we must view [Elgar] as a national English composer, at the same time as a religious
composer, and, strangely enough for a son of Albion, a Catholic composer. Like a game of
chance, it is exceptional that a bard of Catholic mysticism should have arisen in England,
and that it should appear to be the most natural thing.41
300
305
While Hehemann’s comments might suggest that Gerontius was of interest only to
Catholics, Volbach, in his 1904 article for Allgemeine Musikzeitung, hinted that
Elgar’s work contained something of the ‘inner reality’ that concerned the fin de sie`cle
German artists who had engaged creatively with mysticism. ‘An abundance of
completely new moods of the soul, differentiated in minute detail moods that,
like being in a dream, embrace our soul beyond all reality sound forth towards
us from this piece’, wrote Volbach admiringly. ‘The presentation of mystical,
38
39
40
41
Ibid., §52, pp. 333, 335.
‘The knowing individual as such [i.e. one who still consciously knows], and the particular thing
known by him, are always in some place, at some time, and are links in the chain of causes and
effects. The pure subject of knowledge [i.e. one who has lost his sense of individuality through the
contemplation that Schopenhauer deems necessary to come to perceive Ideas directly] and his
correlative, the Idea, have passed out of all these forms of the principle of sufficient reason: time,
place, the individual that knows, and the individual that is known, have for them no meaning’ (ibid.,
§34, p. 232).
Hehemann, ‘Edward Elgar’ (1903), 17: ‘Elgars Nationalität äusserlich am wenigsten aufgeprägt ist.’
Hehemann, ‘Edward Elgar’ (1905), 761: ‘Wir müssen [Elgar] als einen nationalenglischen
Komponisten ansehen, und als einen religiösen dazu und zwar seltsman genug bei einem
Sohne Albions, als einen katholischen. Es nimmt sich aus wie ein Spiel des Zufalls, dass gerade
in England ein Sänger katholischer Mystik entstand, und doch scheint es das natürlichste zu
sein.’
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incomprehensible moods is Elgar’s domain.’42 In his Hochland article, Volbach is
more specific about the form that these mystical moods took:
The entire magic of the deepest, innermost mysticism, as expressed here, and a
blessedness and depth of being, which we experience best in the transfigured
representations of visionary experience by the likes of Suso, express themselves in this
poem; a feeling, carried by ardent divine love far away from mortality, floating away in
blissful spheres. Not to believe in God, but to love Him: for as Caesarius of Heisterbach
said of old, ‘to believe in God is to pass through love into God’. This world-renouncing
transfiguring divine love is the source from which Elgar’s art was born, out of the
mysterious depths of mysticism. In Gerontius for the first time, Elgar found the language
for the inexpressible.43
310
315
320
325
330
The language that Volbach uses to describe mystical experience in Gerontius ‘transfigured’, ‘visionary’, ‘far away from mortality’, ‘world-renouncing’ is drawn
as much from the lexicon of late nineteenth-century mysticism as it is from that of
the Middle Ages; in particular, his seemingly paradoxical closing comment that Elgar
‘found the language for the inexpressible’ is underpinned by Schopenhauer’s belief
that music could reflect the workings of the human Will in a way that no other art
could. Moreover, by referring to Suso and Caesarius, Volbach draws Elgar’s work
into the ambit of German mysticism’s medieval past as much as its postSchopenhauerian present. Thus, to adapt Hehemann’s words, Elgar was entitled
to live ‘as one of us’ in Germany not simply because Gerontius had attracted the
admiration of Strauss, but because its subject matter and means of expression
belonged to the same philosophical tradition as contemporaneous works in music,
art and literature that used mysticism as a creative stimulus. Indeed, one might
almost say that, having been appropriated for that tradition, Gerontius had ‘become’
a German work.
42
43
Volbach, ‘Die ‘‘Apostel’’ von Edward Elgar’, 849: ‘Eine Fülle von ganz neuen, bis ins kleinste
differenzierter Seelenstimmungen, Stimmungen, die wie traumhaft ahnend, jenseits aller Wirklichkeit unsere Seele umfangen, klingen uns aus diesem Werke entgegen. Die Darstellung mystischer
unfaßbarer Stimmungen ist Elgars Domäne.’
Volbach, ‘Edward Elgar’, 317: ‘Der ganze Zauber tiefinnerlichster Mystik, wie er sich hier ausspricht,
eine Beseligung und Tiefe des Wesens, wie wir sie höchstens aus den verklärten Schilderungen
visionären Schauens eines Suso empfinden, spricht sich in dieser Dichtung aus; ein Empfinden,
getragen von brünstiger Gottesminne fernab dem Irdischen, in seligen Sphären verschwebend. Nicht
glauben, Gott lieben: denn Credere in Deum est per dilectionem ire in Deum, sagt der alte Cäsarius von
Heisterbach. Die weltabgewandte, verklärende Gottesminne ist der Quell, aus dem Elgars Kunst
geboren, aus der geheimnisvollen Tiefe der Mystik. Im Gerontius fand Elgar zum ersten Male die
Sprache für das Unausprechliche.’ Caesarius (c.11701240), the prior of the Cistercian Abbey of
Heisterbach, was best known for his 12-book Dialogus magnus visionum ac miraculorum (Great
Dialogue of Visions and Miracles) and the three-book Actus, pasio et miracula domini Engelberte, the
life of St Engelbert, archbishop of Cologne. New editions of these works appeared in 1851 (Cologne)
and 1898 (Elberfeld) respectively.
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Music and mysticism: ‘Novissima hora est’
335
340
345
350
In the light of Schopenhauer’s emphasis on the relationship between music and
abstract feelings and Volbach’s reference to a ‘language for the inexpressible’, it is
worth considering how ideas associated with mysticism may be experienced musically
in Gerontius. To do this, we need to consider the musical and dramatic form of the
work. Gerontius consists of two journeys: the physical journey of an ailing man to his
death in Part I, and the spiritual journey of his immortal soul to its judgment in
Part II.44 These physical and spiritual journeys are mirrored by a long-term flatward
tonal movement, which, as Andreas Friesenhagen has noted, takes place with each
‘number’ of the work.45 Thus Part I begins in D minor, proceeds through B=, E= and
A= majors in the early choruses to the centrepiece aria, ‘Sanctus fortis’, which is in a
modally mixed B=; it then travels through a succession of flat minor keys (E=, A= and
D=) to C> minor (with strong hints of the submediant, E) at ‘Novissima hora est’,
from which it moves, via F> minor, back to D, this time in the major mode. For the
most part, Part II moves along a similar trajectory, at least from the Demons’ Chorus
onwards: the D minor and G minor of that section give way to the E= and A= of the
Angelicals (with a sidestep to C major for the Durchbruch-like chorus, ‘Praise to the
holiest’) and the D= of the Angel of the Agony; and then, following a shift to another
four-sharp key signature as the voices on earth continue the prayers they sang in Part I,
to F> minor at the moment of divine judgment, B minor at the Soul’s horrified reaction
to that judgment (‘Take me away’) and D major for the Angel’s Farewell. These two
tonal journeys are illustrated in Figures 1 and 2 as tonal space diagrams.46 But the
44
45
46
Charles Edward McGuire, Elgar’s Oratorios: The Creation of an Epic Narrative (Aldershot, 2002), 153;
see also Andreas Friesenhagen, ‘An English Oratorio as Pathfinder: Notes on the Form and Layout of
Edward Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius’, The Best of Me, ed. Hodgkins, 10215 (pp. 1034).
Friesenhagen, ‘An English Oratorio as Pathfinder’, esp. pp. 110, 112; see also Moore, Edward Elgar,
305. Gerontius is technically a through-composed work, but old-fashioned ‘number’ structuring is
discernible in both parts. For more on the quasi-number structuring of Gerontius, see McGuire,
Elgar’s Oratorios, Chapter 4 (‘The Dream of Gerontius and Operatic Narrative’), 12676, esp.
pp. 14653 and 16574.
For a theoretical and practical explanation of tonal (and harmonic) space diagrams, see Fred Lerdahl,
Tonal Pitch Space (Oxford, 2001). In Lerdahl’s theory (which develops earlier theories of tonal space,
notably those of Gottfried Weber and Schoenberg), each row consists of alternating major and minor
keys, the minor keys appearing to the right of their tonic major, and to the left of their relative major,
while each column consists of the circles of fifths. ‘Sharp’ keys appear above ‘flat’ keys, so that tonal
movement through increasingly ‘sharp’ keys is viewed as an ascent, and corresponding movement
through increasingly ‘flat’ keys is viewed as a descent. The movement between keys is shown
graphically by arrows. Wherever possible, a journey between two keys should take the shortest
possible path; thus the move from D minor to B= at the beginning of Part I involves a move down
one row to the right rather than down four rows to the left. In some cases, usually when the keys are
some distance apart, there is a certain efficacy in bending this rule; and since in Lerdahl’s theory each
B= major in the grid is theoretically identical with every other B= major, there seems little practical
reason not to do so. Here, the opening and closing tonic keys in each figure are underlined for
clarity.
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D
d
F
Prelude (d)
G
g
B
Gerontius (recit.): ‘Jesu Maria’ (B ) (I/22)
C
c
E
Assistants (chorus): ‘Kyrie eleison’ (E ) (I/29)
Gerontius (recit.): ‘Rouse thee, my fainting soul’ (E )
(I/33)
F
f
A
Assistants (chorus): ‘Be merciful, be gracious’ (A )
(I/35)
B
b
D
Gerontius (aria): ‘Sanctus fortis’ (B /b ) (I/40)
Gerontius (recit.): ‘I can no more’ (B /b ) (I/57)
E
e
F
Assistants (chorus): ‘Rescue him, O Lord’ (e ) (I/63)
A
a
B
Assistants (recit.): ‘Noe from the waters’ (a ) (I/64)
D
c
E
Assistants (chorus): ‘Rescue this thy servant’ (E) (I/65)
Gerontius (recit.): ‘Novissima hora est’ (c ) (I/66)
F
f
A
B
b
D
Priest & Assistants (chorus): ‘Go, in the Name of God’
(D) (I/70)
Figure 1. Elgar, The Dream of Gerontius, Part I, tonal space diagram.
355
360
365
opening of Part II does not fit this pattern. It begins in F major, the relative of D
minor, but then travels along many different paths: through modal, relative and thirdrelated alterations to E minor for the Angel’s ‘My work is done’ (see Figure 3); and
then, following a return to F, to a three-flat key signature (E=, with a strong
hint of C minor) for the Soul’s and Angel’s duet, ‘A presage falls upon thee’,
before moving, via E= minor and G minor, to D minor for the Demons’ Chorus
(Figure 4).47 This is not so much wandering tonality as directionless tonality.
The explanation for this departure from the harmonic pattern of the rest of
the piece lies in the dramatic structure of Part II. The spiritual journey begins
only after the Angel has explained to the Soul why it has to be undertaken at all,
and this takes place in a section that, like both mystical ‘Gelassenheit’ and
Schopenhauerian aesthetic contemplation, seems to transcend time and space. The
musical material is soft, slow, undulating and, above all, repetitive; and the Soul
comments that:
47
It is also possible to conceive of these progressions in neo-Riemannian terms, although the
implications of such an approach lie outside the scope of this article.
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D
d
F
f
A
Demons: ‘Low born clods of brute earth’ (d) (II/32)
G
g
B
b
D
Demons: ‘Disposessed, aside thrust’ (g) (II/35:3)
Demons: ‘The mind bold and independent’ (g) (II/43)
C
c
E
e
F
Soul: ‘I see not those false spirits’ (E ) (II/55)
Angelicals: ‘Praise to the Holiest’ (2) (C) (II/74)
F
f
A
a
B
Angelicals: ‘Praise to the Holiest’ (1) (A ) (II/61)
Angel: ‘Thy judgement now is near’ (A ) (II/101)
B
b
D
c
E
Angel of Agony: ‘Jesu! by that shudd’ring dread’
(D ) (II/106)
Voices on earth: ‘Be merciful’ (E) (II/115)
E
e
F
f
A
Soul: ‘Take me away’ (f
A
a
B
b
D
Souls in Purgatory: ‘Lord, thou hast been our refuge’
(D) (II/125)
Angel: ‘Softly and gently’ (D) (II/126)
b) (II/120)
Figure 2. Elgar, The Dream of Gerontius, Part II, from the Demons’ Chorus onwards, tonal space
diagram.
370
I hear no more the busy beat of time,
No, nor my flutt’ring breath, nor struggling pulse;
Nor does one moment differ from the next.
Within such an extraordinarily static atmosphere, any goal-directed tonal narrative
would be impossible: it would betray a sense of temporality that is entirely alien to
the text. Instead, the music circumnavigates F major and D minor (the one-flat
1: Opening Soul: ‘I went to sleep’ (F) (II/4)
2: Soul: ‘A strange refreshment’ (f A ) (II/5)
3: Soul: ‘Another marvel’ (E ) (II/9:3)
4: Soul: ‘A uniform And gentle pressure tells me I am not Self moving’ (G) (II/10)
5: Soul: ‘And hark! I hear a singing’ (II/10:5) Angel: ‘My work is done’ (E e) (II/11:6)
6: Angel: ‘It is a member of that family’ (a) (II/16)
7: Soul: ‘What lets me now from going to my Lord?’ (F) (II/22)
Figure 3. Elgar, The Dream of Gerontius, Part II, opening section, first cycle.
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1: Soul: ‘What lets me now from going to my Lord?’ (F) (II/22)
2: Angel: ‘It is because Then thou didst fear’ (a) (II/24)
3: Soul & Angel: ‘A presage falls upon thee’ (E /c) (II/26)
4: Soul: ‘But hark! upon my sense’ (b ) (II/29:2)
5: Angel: ‘We are now arrived’ (e ) (II/30:2)
6: Soul: ‘Hungry and wild to claim their property’ (g) (II/31:2)
7: Demons: ‘Low born clods of brute earth’ (d) (II/32)
Figure 4. Elgar, The Dream of Gerontius, Part II, opening section, second cycle.
375
380
385
390
395
keys that respectively begin and end the section) without showing any signs of
travelling to any alternative destination. In short, it is music in keeping with the
state in which the Soul finds itself at the beginning of Part II, and in which it
remains suspended (barring occasional reflections on its mortal form’s past fears of
judgment, fears which the Angel quickly dispels) until the beginning of the
Demons’ Chorus. Only with the start of that chorus, and with it the start of the
Soul’s journey to the Almighty, does the long-term tonal narrative of Part II
properly begin.48
While the transcendence at the opening of Part II is not bound by any particular
creed prior to the arrival of the Angel, the Soul says nothing that refers to Christian
doctrine other passages in the work suggest mysticism that is more specifically
Catholic in nature. A good example of this is the figure that Elgar sets to the words
‘Novissima hora est’ (hereafter referred to as ‘Novissima hora’), with which
Gerontius dies in Part I (see Example 1(a)); it appears four times throughout the
piece, most memorably in the immediate aftermath of the Soul’s coming face to face
with God in Part II. Hehemann’s claim that the motif is associated with ‘the return
of the highest ecstasy of the hereafter’ is particularly apt.49 In mysticism, ecstasy was,
according to Jakob Mühlethaler, a ‘condition of complete seclusion of the soul,
where the outside world steps back, dazzled by the brilliance of an inner light [. . .]
which illuminates for us a spiritual world for immediate vision’, and was often
characterized by a ‘loss of self-consciousness’, ‘loss of consciousness of space and
48
49
McGuire’s analysis of Part II (Elgar’s Oratorios, 16574) refers to the Demons, Angelicals and Angel
of the Agony/Judgment sections as ‘tableaux entendus’, which ‘teach the Soul and the audience
something about the afterworld’ through the large-scale choruses and the dialogue between the Soul
and the Angel (p. 165). Although the tableaux necessarily have to appear in a particular order, their
essentially reflective and explanatory character means that they are characterized not by drama that
moves forward in time (with the exception of the moment of judgment itself) but by the
intensification of a particular moment.
Hehemann, ‘Edward Elgar’ (1903), 17: ‘die höchsten Wonnen den Jenseits wiederkehren’.
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Example 1(a). Elgar, The Dream of Gerontius, Part I, rehearsal figures 66:167:10: first appearance of
‘Novissima hora’.
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Example 1(a) (Continued)
Example 1(b). Elgar, The Dream of Gerontius: ‘Christ’s Peace’ motif.
3
time’, and an ‘absence of all ideas and concepts, particularly in the condition where
the identity of the subject and object are experienced in the same way’.50 In short,
ecstasy combines ‘Gelassenheit’ and revelatory self-knowledge: precisely what the
50
Mühlethaler, Die Mystik bei Schopenhauer, 878: ‘ein Zustand völliger Abgeschiedenheit der Seele,
wo die äußere Welt zurücktritt, überstrahlt vom Glanze eines innern Lichtes, [. . .] eines Lichtes, das
uns eine geistige Welt zur unmittelbaren Schauung beleuchtet’; ‘ein Verschwinden des IchBewußtseins’; ‘Verlust des Raum- und Zeitbewußtseins’; ‘Fehlen aller Vorstellungen und Begriffe,
überhaupt als einen Zustand, wo die Identität von Subjekt und Objekt gleichsam erlebt wird’.
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Example 1(c). Elgar, The Dream of Gerontius: ‘Christ’s Peace’ motif.
400
405
410
415
Soul experiences at the moment of divine judgment. For this reason, ‘Novissima
hora’ merits closer hermeneutical consideration.51
According to Jerrold Northrop Moore, the musical origins of ‘Novissima hora’ lie
in two motifs introduced earlier in Part I: ‘Christ’s peace’ (Part I, rehearsal figure
22:5; see Example 1(b)), and the ‘Agony’ music (Part I, rehearsal figure 62:57; see
Example 1(c)), although in both cases, the initial leap is of a fifth rather than a
fourth.52 Moore’s suggestion is certainly appropriate when we consider the words
with which the motif appears. The main textual association of ‘Novissima hora’ is
with the moment in death when human soul and divinity meet: a moment, in other
words, that combines the agony of receiving divine judgment with the hope of
eternal life and heavenly peace. Thus at the motif’s first appearance in Part I
(rehearsal figure 66), Gerontius’s cry ‘Novissima hora est’ (‘It is the last hour’) quotes
a passage from the first epistle of St John that warns of antichrists as the second
coming draws near; a few bars later, Gerontius’s earthly life ends with the utterance,
‘Into Thy hands, O Lord’ (rehearsal figure 67:5), a reference to St Luke’s account of
the Crucifixion.53 The motif reappears midway through Part II, when the Soul,
having just overcome the Demons, asks its Guardian Angel: ‘shall I see/My dearest
Master, when I reach His throne?’ The Angel replies that the Soul will indeed see
51
52
53
No examination of the motivic content of Gerontius would be complete without recourse to Jaeger’s
Analytical and Descriptive Notes on the work (August J. Jaeger, The Dream of Gerontius, John Henry
Newman and Edward Elgar: Analytical and Descriptive Notes (London, 1901; rev. edn 1974)).
Written for the work’s première, the Notes aimed to provide listeners with a synopsis of the main
musical themes in a manner similar to Hans von Wolzogen’s thematic guide to the Ring cycle, in
which Wagner’s leitmotifs are given specific non-musical labels. While Elgar was certainly flattered
by Jaeger’s implicit comparison of him with Wagner though the extent to which the themes in
Gerontius are strictly speaking leitmotifs rather than reminiscence motifs is certainly debatable he
distanced himself from his friend’s insistence that the themes in Gerontius be given ‘a one word name
wherever possible’, commenting that ‘my wife fears you may be inclined to lay too great stress on the
leitmotiven plan because I really do it without thought intuitively, I mean’. As Christopher Grogan
has commented, Alice’s alleged concerns were undoubtedly Elgar’s own; he ‘seem[ed . . .] to have
anticipated the likely adverse influence of Jaeger’s methods upon the audience and the critics, who
would be encouraged to perceive the music as no more than the stringing together of essentially
unconnected thematic tags’. In the event, Jaeger gave names to only 15 of the 76 quoted themes,
including ‘Novissima hora’, and these names were put in parentheses. See letter from Jaeger to Elgar,
26 August 1900, and letter from Elgar to Jaeger, 28 August 1900; both are quoted in Christopher
Grogan, ‘‘‘My dear analyst’’: Some Observations on Elgar’s Correspondence with A. J. Jaeger
regarding the ‘‘Apostles’’ Project’, Music and Letters, 72 (1991), 4860 (pp. 489) (italics original).
Moore, Edward Elgar, 305.
1 John ii. 18; Luke xxiii. 46. Appropriately, Jaeger describes the figures as ‘plaintive’ (The Dream of
Gerontius, 14).
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425
430
435
440
445
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God ‘for one moment’, adding, to the strains of ‘Novissima hora’, ‘that sight of
the Most Fair/Will gladden thee, but it will pierce thee too’ (rehearsal figure 56:5).
The word ‘pierce’ comes at the climax of the phrase, emphasizing the connection
between Christ’s sacrifice and the pain the Soul would feel on being confronted
directly with its sinful life. To this anticipation of agony, however, may be added the
anticipation of eventual transfiguration at rehearsal figure 112:5, when the Angel of
the Agony petitions God on behalf of souls currently in purgatory, again
accompanied by the ‘Novissima hora’ motif: ‘Hasten, Lord, their hour, and bid
them come to Thee,/To that glorious Home, where they shall ever gaze on Thee.’
And it is to ‘Novissima hora’ that the Soul sings its reaction to its moment of
judgment before God, ‘Take me away’ (rehearsal figure 120). Starkly aware of its
inherently sinful nature, the Soul is filled with shame and self-revulsion, which gives
way within a few bars to a desire for purgation (‘and in the lowest deep/There let me
be’). Purgatory will be a further agony, but it is a necessary one if the Soul is
eventually to have eternal life.
A particular feature of the ‘Novissima hora’ motif is that the texts it accompanies
reflect Catholicism’s dialectical approach to forgiveness. The familiar Catholic ‘cycle’
of sinconfessionforgiveness is transmuted, in death, to earthly sinsjudgment
atonement; in turn, atonement takes the dialectical form of judgmentpurgatory
heaven. ‘Novissima hora’ illustrates passages that glimpse the syntheses (atonement/
heaven), but only through emphasizing the antitheses (the Soul’s shortcomings and
its need for purgation before reaching paradise). In other words, for all its otherworldliness, it draws attention to the fact that Gerontius is ‘a man like us’, whose
encounters with God show up his imperfections and the need to remedy them.
The four statements of ‘Novissima hora’, which we shall now consider in turn,
vary in key, instrumentation, phrasing and, latterly, metre; these differences are
summarized in Table 1. One thing that they have in common, however, is an
inability to attain successful closure. This is because the underlying harmonic
progression of ‘Novissima hora’, iv6 iv6, is iterative: the closing iv6 chord is
tonicized by a V4/3 i cadence and the motif is repeated a fifth lower (see Figure 5).
In theory, and assuming some octave displacement to preserve audibility, this
progression could perpetuate itself indefinitely through the circle of fifths, a feature
that aptly complements the motif’s textual associations with the eternal; thus when
TABLE 1
APPEARANCES OF THE ‘NOVISSIMA HORA’ MOTIF
Passage
Dynamic
Key
Metre
Scoring
I/66
II/56
II/112
II/120
p/pp/ppp
p, cresc. to f
p, cresc. to ff
Fff to pp
c>/f>/b
d>/g>/c>
f/b=
f>/b
3/4
3/4
3/4
4/4
Gerontius, 1st and 2nd violins, violas
Angel, 3 solo violas, 3 solo cellos
Angel of the Agony, strings, woodwind, horns
Soul, full orchestra
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Figure 5. Harmonic reduction of ‘Novissima’ motif, The Dream of Gerontius, Part I, figures 66:266:6.
450
455
460
465
470
475
480
the progression is halted the sense of caesura is particularly pronounced. A good
example of this is in the initial statement of the motif (Example 1(a)). We hear the
progression twice: first in C> minor, when the orchestra accompanies the singer; then
in F> minor, when the orchestra plays alone. The second phrase ends on iv6/f>, a firstinversion B minor chord that seemingly demands tonicization by a closing cadence.
But this does not happen. Instead, the chord simply dies away, and a vocal recitative
takes the music to the Lydian-inflected D major of the ‘Fear’ and ‘Miserere’ motifs
(rehearsal figures 67:1 and 67:7 respectively); the dying Gerontius sings his last
words (‘Into Thy hands, O Lord’), and once more the music peters out on a firstinversion chord of B minor. Again, this chord is left unresolved. After a short pause,
the music turns to B= for the Priest’s ‘Proficiscere, anima Christiana’, and thence to
D major for the closing chorus of Part I.
First-inversion chords are unlikely to provide entirely convincing points of closure.
But there is an additional reason why the first of these B minor chords feels
particularly unsatisfactory. This is the upward chromatic movement of the second
violins in the third bar of the ‘Novissima hora’ phrase (the AA> B at rehearsal
figure 66:8), which seems gesturally to be asking a question that will remain
unanswered unless the figure can receive tonal affirmation with a Vi cadence to a
root-position B minor. What, hermeneutically, might this interrogative gesture
mean? One possible answer is that, given the association of the ‘Novissima hora’
motif with the eternal, the lack of closure at figure 66:9 may suggest the infinite
itself. If so, the purpose of the rising chromatic line is surely to emphasize that all
humanity (whether Gerontius, the composer, the audience or anyone else) has to
inquire as to the nature of that infinity, since it exists outside normal human space
time parameters. For Gerontius to need to ask such questions may indicate his very
human lack of faith, and ignorance of what is to come, that is belied by his various
biblical allusions. Thus the purpose of this passage is to express not only the faith of
the dying Gerontius, but also, musically, his doubts. And it is perhaps for this reason
that at rehearsal figure 66:6 it is the orchestra that continues the musical argument,
not the soloist: taking its cue from the end of Parsifal, an orchestra may hint what
words cannot say. But it can hint only so far. As yet, we have no idea of the nature of
the God whom the soul will meet, nor of the type of divine judgment that it will
receive. The answers to these questions become clearer only in subsequent statements
of the motif.
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490
495
500
505
510
515
520
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A feature of the second appearance of ‘Novissima hora’ (see Example 2) is the
disruption of musical grammar initially dynamic and metrical, latterly harmonic caused by the caesura that halts the unending progressions of the motif. As the
Angel’s description of the ‘sight of the Most Fair’ turns from gladness to pain, the
phrase-length is compressed from four bars to three (rehearsal figure 56:911); on
the word ‘pierce’ the motif’s self-perpetuating is punctured by a loud brass chord of
C> minor. But although this chord has been prepared by the V4/3 i cadence, it does
not betoken tonal stability; instead, over the next eight bars the tonal centre moves to
E minor via a series of diminished and dominant sevenths in the clarinets and
bassoons, above which the Soul intones an angular piece of recitative. The role of
‘Novissima hora’ here, therefore, is to signal a momentary breakdown of musical
coherence, one that is analogous to the pain involved in seeing God, unpurged of
one’s sins, or perhaps indicative of the collapse of human conceptions of relativity
when confronting the infinite. As in Part I, the motif is musically disturbing: it raises
questions that it cannot (yet) answer, and instead responds by fragmenting.
A more definite, but negative, answer results from the questions posed by the third
statement of ‘Novissima hora’, which appears at rehearsal figure 112:5 (see Example 3),
towards the end of the Angel of the Agony’s solo.54 The four-bar phrase is stated
twice as the Angel sings of the ‘glorious Home’ that awaits the souls in purgatory,
and this is followed by a further four bars that end on a first-inversion chord of D=
major (the ‘gaze’ of ‘where they shall ever gaze on Thee’). Given that D= is the local
tonic, this would seem to indicate that ‘Novissima hora’ supports the musical
grammar here, rather than undermines it; and at one level this is true. But the
contrast between the pp dolcissimo ascending scale of the first violins at rehearsal
figure 113 and the ivI/D= cadence that follows the second fermata is very striking.
The former still speaks the celestial language of ‘Novissima hora’; indeed the
ascending scale, ending onˆ5/D=, faintly recalls the Dresden Amen of Parsifal
(appropriately enough, in view of the text’s suggestions of eternity). This Dresden
Amen, however, is inherently unstable: its ‘resolution’ onto a first-inversion chord
suggests that hopes of eternity will for the moment be dashed. And dashed they are:
the plagal cadence at the Allargando confirms D= (albeit a modally mixed D=) as the
tonic, but in a way that seems brutally to mock the higher aspirations of the bars
immediately preceding it. The Amen of paradise has been quashed by the Amen of
impending purgatory.
Thus the ‘meaning’ of ‘Novissima hora’ is somewhat ambiguous. The words
associated with the motif point to the desirability of heaven, but its music suggests
that, at present, such eternity is beyond the Soul’s grasp. ‘Novissima hora’ asks
hopeful questions about eternity, but these are met with negative answers that
54
Gerontius is not a ‘number’ oratorio, so this solo (figures 10614) is not designated an aria. But it has
certain aria-like qualities: a scena and recitative introduction (figures 1016); an internal Bar form
(two Stollen at figures 106 and 108:3, and an Abgesang at 110:3); and, for all its chromaticism the
openings of the Stollen are characterized by I/=II discords a single tonic (D=).
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Example 2. Elgar, The Dream of Gerontius, Part II, rehearsal figures 56:457:7: second appearance of
‘Novissima hora’.
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Example 2 (Continued)
525
530
emphasize the obstacle to the Soul’s entering heaven: its sinfulness. So it is
particularly apt that ‘Novissima hora’ is central to the Soul’s reaction to its meeting
with the Almighty at rehearsal figure 120 (see Example 4), for it is here that the Soul
feels its sinfulness most acutely. The general pause that represents the meeting itself is
followed by a fff chord of V13/f > where, Elgar wrote in the score, ‘‘‘for one moment’’
must every instrument exert its fullest force’.55 The falling semitone in the main
melodic voice, a‘‘g >’’, recalls part of the ‘Judgment’ motif with which the piece
opens.56 But it is ‘Novissima hora’, no longer celestially lyrical but dramatic and
awesome, that expresses the self-loathing that the Soul feels on receiving its judgment
(rehearsal figure 120:3). The motif is musically transformed from its previous
manifestations in several ways. Most obviously, its triple metre is altered to the 4/4 of
the ‘Judgment’ motif, and thus literally ‘marches’ to the time of the divine verdict:
immediate absolution from earthly wrongs is not a possibility. The phrase is
55
56
This forceful reaction was not in Elgar’s original plans. He had intended ‘Take me away’ to be set
quietly, part of a gradual diminuendo that took place from ‘Praise to the Holiest’ to the end of the
work, in order to give the impression of a Soul ‘shrivelled, parched & effete, powerless & finished’
from the minute it had seen God. However, he responded to criticism from Jaeger, who argued that
‘the first sensations the soul would experience [on seeing God] would be an awful, overwhelming
agitation !; a whirlwind of sensations of the acutest kind coursing through it; a bewilderment of fear,
exitation, crushing, overmastering hopelessness &c &c, ‘‘Take me away!!’’’. Jaeger added that Wagner
‘would have made this the climax of expression in the work’, whereas Elgar’s proposed solution had
‘shirked [. . .] the supremest moment’. The negative comparison with Wagner and, in a subsequent
letter, with Richard Strauss, seemed to act as a spur to Elgar, who revised the section to something
closer to what Jaeger had envisaged. See Elgar, letter to Jaeger, 20 June 1900, quoted in Elgar and his
Publishers, ed. Moore, i, 202; Jaeger, letter to Elgar, 27 June 1900, quoted ibid., 2045 (Jaeger’s
italics); and Jaeger, letter to Elgar, 30 June 1900, quoted ibid., 208.
Moore, Edward Elgar, 300. Note, however, that the aƒg >ƒc >ƒaƒ melodic line at figure 120 recalls
the f >?e >?a > f > at figures 56:35 in Part II. In the earlier passage the Angel sings ‘Thou knowest
not, my child, What thou dost ask’ when the Soul expresses his hope that he will see God; in the later
passage this knowledge is made fully apparent.
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Example 3. Elgar, The Dream of Gerontius, Part II, rehearsal figures 112:1113:7: third appearance of
‘Novissima hora’.
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Example 3 (Continued)
535
540
545
extended to five bars, complete with a written ritardando (another caesura), as if to
give the Soul a moment to gather its thoughts and express itself coherently, this time
in B minor. But the Moderato passage that ensues at rehearsal figure 120:8 is
anything but coherent. Instead of a second four-bar statement of ‘Novissima hora’
(which earlier statements of the motif suggest would be the most likely continuation
here), the motif is liquidated. Its initial leap of a sixth survives (in the first violins and
violas), but that is all; in its place the clarinets and cellos intone the rhythms and
descending chromaticism of the ‘Judgment’ motif, while Chs in the vocal line and
harmony cast doubt on the stability of B minor as a tonal centre. It is as if
‘Novissima hora’, quite literally, has lost its voice.
Why is this so? A possible reason is that, from its first appearance in Part I,
‘Novissima hora’ has been associated with a hoped-for heavenly respite from earthly
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Example 4. Elgar, The Dream of Gerontius, Part II, rehearsal figures 120:1120:10: fourth appearance of
‘Novissima hora’.
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555
560
565
570
575
580
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woes; now that these hopes have been crushed (at least for the time being), the motif
is incapable of saying anything more.57 If this is the case, then rehearsal figure 120 in
Part II is perhaps the answer to the musical questions posed in Part I, at rehearsal
figure 66. That earlier section suggested doubts in the attainability of Gerontius’s
goal: at F> minor, the voice fell silent; and at B minor, the orchestra did. In Part II, at
rehearsal figure 120, these doubts are confirmed: the voice re-enters in F> minor, but
the orchestra’s (and voice’s) attempt to continue ‘Novissima hora’ in B minor fails.
Subsequent attempts to resurrect the motif are no more successful. At rehearsal figure
122, an ascending sixth in the violins signals an attempt to do so, this time in E
minor; but again non-harmonic notes in the melody Fh in 122:1, E= in 122:2 put
paid to this. By contrast, several other motifs are eminently recognizable, notably the
‘Sanctus’ music (rehearsal figure 121:5) and, especially, the Angel/Soul duet from
Part II, figure 26 (rehearsal figure 123). But it is significant that these figures
previously expressed the Soul’s (or Gerontius’s) hopes and fears before judgment;
they formed part of the journey to the telos of rehearsal figure 120, and, in their
post-telos manifestation, form part of a similar journey to (and, we may assume,
eventually beyond) purgatory. ‘Novissima hora’, however, is different. Even in its
pre-telos statements it anticipates the moment of judgment itself: a moment that
exists beyond time and space, and one with which the Soul cannot cope when it
experiences it at rehearsal figure 120. It is scarcely surprising that the motif should be
the cause of fragmentation rather than proper closure; given its association with the
infinite, which by its nature is indefinable, closure was perhaps always impossible.
A hermeneutic analysis of this sort reveals important differences between Gerontius
and Tod und Verklärung. The narrative of Strauss’s work is fairly simple: a hero dies,
is transfigured, and arrives in Elysium. Such a straightforward outcome is foreign to
Gerontius, however; a motif like ‘Novissima hora’, which is associated both with a
heavenly destination that remains out of reach and a state of sinfulness whose
purgation begins only when the work ends, testifies to a work that resists any clearcut conclusion. In part, this is because in Gerontius, unlike Tod, there are two
protagonists: the dying man whose spiritual journey we follow, and the Almighty
who passes judgment on him. The conflict between them, however, is not
conventionally dramatic, but rather psychological. God is not depicted musically;
the Soul receives its sentence in silence. Instead, God’s character is revealed secondhand: by the Soul’s questions and the Guardian Angel’s answers prior to judgment,
and by the Soul’s tortured reaction afterwards. Yet there is a difference between the
Soul’s pre- and post-judgment views of God. Pre-judgment, the Almighty is
constructed as a subconscious projection of the Soul’s mind a God whom the Soul
purports to understand, and with whom it believes it can be ‘united’ forever. But the
57
Appropriately enough, it is at the words ‘a singer who sings no more’ that ‘Novissima hora’ is quoted
in Elgar’s later choral work The Music Makers. For more on the web of self-quotations and allusions
that Elgar uses in this piece, see Aidan J. Thomson, ‘Unmaking The Music Makers’, Elgar Studies, ed.
J. P. E. Harper-Scott and Julian Rushton (Cambridge, 2007), 99134.
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moment of judgment reveals a far greater God, one beyond the Soul’s imagination,
and before whom it feels alienated. On meeting the real Almighty, the Soul is acutely
conscious of the sinfulness of ‘all that makes me man’; it cannot dwell eternally with
God at least, not yet. Moreover, as with the opening of Part II, the existence of
something infinite, eternal, beyond human conceptions of time and space, is too
much for the Soul to cope with and the music illustrates this lack of
comprehension accordingly.
Mysticism and genre: oratorio as epic
595
600
605
610
The differing treatment of time and tonal direction in Gerontius, across the work as a
whole and in the context of individual motifs, raises important questions about how
(indeed whether) the work fits into the generic boundaries of oratorio. Strictly
speaking, Gerontius is not an oratorio at all; as Michael Kennedy has observed, ‘the
whole point of the work is that it cannot be fitted into such a category’, and it was
‘simply what Elgar called it on the title-page: a setting to music of a poem’.58 But
this distinction is somewhat artificial. As a large-scale sacred choral work, Gerontius
may be said to have been written in dialogue with the nineteenth-century English
oratorio tradition (a tradition Ernest Newman described damningly as ‘this deadly
form of British art, the day for which has long gone by’). This fact was acknowledged
by contemporary critics from both sides of the English Channel; some of them,
indeed, described the work as an oratorio, whatever was written on the title page.59
Far more important is to ascertain what type of oratorio Gerontius might be. To this
end Elgar’s German critics once more offer a possible solution, and one that is
consistent with their mystical conception of the work.
Elgar’s German supporters objected not to oratorio per se, as Newman did, but to
Mendelssohn’s legacy within the genre, which they considered to be characterized by
stylistic conservatism and dramatic mundaneness.60 Part of Elgar’s appeal to these
critics lay in the more progressive idiom of Gerontius, and it is striking how they
attempted to distance him from Mendelssohn. In an article about The Apostles,
Neitzel claimed that the ‘mystical-Catholic contemplation [. . .] of which [Elgar]
58
59
60
Michael Kennedy, Portrait of Elgar (3rd edn, Oxford, 1984), 134. For a good survey of the
difficulties involved in the generic classification of Gerontius, see McGuire, Elgar’s Oratorios, 3845.
Newman, Elgar, 55. Later in the same paragraph Newman explicitly describes Gerontius as an
oratorio: ‘It was because in his next oratorio [Gerontius] Elgar was fortunate enough to get a theme
alive with human emotion from first to last that he succeeded in making of it such a masterpiece.’
For a German critique that refers to Gerontius as an oratorio, see n. 16 above.
Although the extent to which Volbach and Neitzel would have been aware of this is questionable,
these exponents would have included a great many nineteenth-century British composers; as Howard
E. Smither has observed: ‘From the late 1840s to the 1880s, the primary model [for English oratorio]
was Mendelssohn’ (‘Oratorio: England and America, 19th century’, New Grove Online, Bhttp://
www.oxfordmusiconline.com, accessed 3 May 2013).
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620
635
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already gave many examples in the second part of The Dream of Gerontius’ belonged
to a specifically mystical tradition of oratorio whose modern exemplars were Liszt
and the Belgian composer Edgar Tinel (18541912), rather than Mendelssohn.61
Neitzel did not specify from where this tradition originated, but his approving
description of the choruses in The Apostles as the ‘ground pillars of the mood of the
text’ would seem to suggest Handel, the composer of some of the most famous of all
oratorio choruses.62 Volbach also viewed Elgar as the natural successor to Handel
and Liszt. Handel’s oratorios, he observed, were notable for the fact that their heroes
did not choose their destinies; rather
above them stands a higher power, Jehovah, the Almighty; He is the real master of
destinies. He controls them invisibly, but we sense His nearness, we feel it from the roar of
the mighty choruses, which become the real centrepieces of the whole thing, and grow
powerfully in breadth. [. . .] the entirety is raised into the spheres of the sublime.63
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630
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With Handel the audience almost felt a sense of oneness with God, but Volbach
argued (with possibly just a hint of anti-Semitism) that this was not a characteristic
of Handel’s most popular successor in England: ‘None of his [Handel’s] successors least of all Mendelssohn were capable of grasping the greatness and grandeur of
this idea.’64 The exception to this was Liszt; in works such as Christus (185666)
there was ‘no plot development in the sense that one would find in a drama, only
great, large-scale pictures which are erected on the noble golden background of
powerful choruses, standing one next to the other. But they are connected by one
great sublime thought.’65 The sublime in oratorio, as Volbach perceived it, was thus
61
62
63
64
65
Neitzel, ‘Die Apostel’, 677: ‘mystisch-katholische Betrachtungen [. . .] von deren [Elgar] schon im
zweiten Teil des Gerontiustraumes soviel Belege gab’. According to Neitzel, Elgar ‘in this respect
goes considerably further than Liszt and Tinel, of whom the second still more than the first has
remained in the forecourt of mysticism’ (‘geht hierin erheblich weiter als Liszt und Tinel, von den
der zweite noch mehr als der erste im Vorhofe des Mystizismus stehen blieb’). Tinel’s oratorio St
Francis was performed at the Cardiff Festival in 1895, but received a mixed reception; the Special
Correspondent of the Musical Times complained that the whole of the first part of the work
concentrated on the worldly period of the saint’s life, and that the third part made ‘a pious end in a
space of time remarkably brief by contrast with the prolonged lamentations raised above his remains
and the jubilations with which his apotheosis is celebrated by way of Finale’. See ‘Cardiff Musical
Festival’, Musical Times 36/632 (October 1895), 6723 (p. 672).
Neitzel, ‘Die Apostel’, 678: ‘Grundsäulen der jedesmaligen Textstimmung’.
Volbach, ‘Edward Elgar’, 318: ‘über ihnen steht eine höhere Macht, Jehova, der Gewaltige. Er ist der
wirkliche Lenker der Geschicke. Unsichtbar leitet er sie, aber wir ahnen seine Nähe, wir fühlen sie
aus dem Brausen der mächtigen Chöre, die so zum eigentlichen Mittelpunkte des Ganzen werden,
und mächtig in die Breite wachsen. [. . .] das Ganze ist emporgerückt in die Sphäre des Erhabenen’.
Ibid.: ‘Keiner seiner [Handel’s] Nachfolger am wenigsten Mendelssohn vermochte die Größe
und Erhabenheit dieser Idee zu fassen.’
Ibid.: ‘Keine Entwicklung einer Handlung im Sinne des Dramas; nur große, breit angelegte Bilder,
die sich auf dem erhabenen Goldgrunde mächtiger Chöre aufbauen, stehen neben einander. Aber
verbunden sind die durch einen großen erhabenen Gedanken.’
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characterized by the avoidance of conventional drama; what plot there was existed
almost beyond time, rather than within it. And it was this lack of dramatic
development that Volbach sensed in Elgar’s works, which, he claimed, were
composed of individual scenes, broadly-sweeping pictures, without a continuous plot and
held together by the idea of the invisible Divine and the Sublime. In Gerontius, the
incorporeal Soul, fought over by the Angel and Demons, takes centre stage; we hear how
strange, dreamlike sensations overcome the Soul as it flies between the world and eternity,
anxiously expecting to stand before its Judge.66
640
645
650
655
660
It might appear that Volbach conceived of Elgar’s oratorios as a sort of musical
stream-of-consciousness. Such a conception would certainly be consistent with
Hartmann’s aforementioned definition of mysticism, in which feelings come from
within rather than from dialectical procedures; thus Volbach’s reading of Elgar’s
dramaturgy perceives the ‘action’ of Gerontius to be driven by the subconscious
rather than by the rational mind. This is obviously an appropriate interpretation
for a piece that depicts a dream, where the subconscious does not operate in a
linear fashion, but through a process of selective memory that conflates events
which may have no relationship to each other.67 But the implications of Volbach’s
argument go further than this. For oratorio to be ‘raised into the spheres of the
sublime’ suggests that it should be seen as analogous not to drama but to epic: a
genre whose scale is larger than life, and whose heroes’ great deeds exist as
exemplars outside any sense of dramatic time. It is thus the opposite of opera,
whose drama relies entirely on a sense of progress in time. Gerontius, a work in
which the action takes place in a single moment in time, is clearly a piece within
that epic tradition; as it was ‘the idea of the invisible Divine and the Spiritual’ that
held it together, rather than ‘continuous action’, it was consequently ‘conceivable
only as oratorio’.68
It is surely no coincidence that at least one contemporary critic who found
difficulties with Gerontius did so because he conceived of the work in terms that
66
67
68
Ibid., 31819: ‘setzen sich aus einzelnen Szenen zusammen, breit ausladenden Bildern, ohne
fortlaufende Handlung, und zusammengesfaßt durch die Idee des unsichtbar Göttlichen, Erhabenen.
Im Gerontius steht sogar die körperlose Seele, um die Engel und Dämonen streiten, im
Mittelpunkte; eigenartige, traumhafte Empfindungen, wie sie die Seele befallen, während sie
dahineilt zwischen Welt und Ewigkeit, bang erwartend, vor ihren Richter zu treten.’
Cf. Percy Young’s comment that ‘being the pattern of a spiritual progress traced in a dream it was
inaccessible as a narrative’. Young also draws attention to the fact that, besides the première of
Gerontius, 1900 also saw the publication of Sigmund Freud’s Träumdeutung. See Percy M. Young,
Elgar, Newman and The Dream of Gerontius: In The Tradition of English Catholicism (Aldershot,
1995), xi.
Volbach, ‘Edward Elgar’, 318: ‘die Idee des unsichtbar Göttlichen, Erhabenen’; ‘fortlausende
Handlung’; ‘nur als Oratorium denkbar’.
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685
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owed more to drama than to epic. Willy Seibert, reviewing the second Düsseldorf
performance of Gerontius in Die Musik, was sometimes irritated by the work,
because it seemed to lack the conventional dramatic teleology of a piece like Tod
und Verklärung. Whilst acknowledging that the choruses were ‘outstandingly
beautiful and enthralling’ (‘hervorragend schön und packend’) expressions of the
poem’s mystical atmosphere, he implied that they retarded the forward momentum
of the piece. ‘But the nature and intentions of the work mean that intensifications,
as rendered in the motivically built-up choruses, are lacking’, he complained.
‘Lengthy scenes are constructed through the subordination of the musical idea to
the content of each moment; these tire through the lack of contrasts, giving rise to
a certain harmonic forcedness. In the second part of this enormously interesting
work, this becomes almost disastrous.’69 Characterization, in Seibert’s eyes, meant
following a protagonist’s actions; for Volbach, by contrast, it meant a process of
deepening that occurred through reflection. And Elgar brought about such a
process, Volbach believed, through a use of leitmotif that went beyond mere
reminiscence to recall Wagner. In the motifs of The Apostles and The Kingdom, ‘the
meaning of the emotions of the principal characters and crucial moments is more
or less condensed. These occur throughout the work, sometimes combining ideas,
sometimes deepening them, sometimes turning the attention back to what has
happened, or looking prophetically into the future.’70 Admittedly, in the two later
works, which are set within an extensive timescale, leitmotifs can play an
anticipatory and recollective role that they are denied in Gerontius. But we may
infer that it is also possible to use a leitmotif system even in a work, like Gerontius,
that is characterized by timelessness, in order to develop particular ideas
psychologically.71
69
70
71
Willy Seibert, ‘Das 79. Niederrheinische Musikfest in Düsseldorf’, Die Musik, 1/18 (June 1902),
1681: ‘Es liegt aber in der Natur der Sache und der Absichten, dass Steigerungen, wie sie motivisch
aufgebaute Chöre ergeben, ausbleiben und durch die Unterordnung der musikalischen Idee unter
den jeweiligen Inhalt Längen entstehen, die durch das Fehlen der Kontraste, wozu noch eine gewisse
harmonische Gequältheit kommt, ermüden. Das wird dem zweiten Teil des riesig interessanten
Werkes fast verhängnisvoll.’
Volbach, ‘Edward Elgar’, 321: ‘sich der Empfindungsgehalt der Hauptcharaktere und Momente
gewissermaßen verdichtet. Sie ziehen sich durch das Werk, die Gedanken bald verknüpfend, bald
vertiefend, lenken den Blick zurück auf Geschehenes, weisen prophetisch verkündend in die
Zukunft.’
Like many of his contemporaries, Volbach understood ‘leitmotif’ to be more or less synonymous
with what we know as a ‘reminiscence theme’, and not as a musical motif that formed the musical as
well as the dramatic substance of music drama (see McGuire, Elgar’s Oratorios, 846, for a useful
summary of the changing definitions of ‘leitmotif’). Given the number-like structures of Gerontius
(alluded to in n. 45 above) and the two Apostles oratorios, Volbach’s terminology is obviously wrong;
yet his sense that Elgar’s motifs could both deepen and anticipate ideas suggest that they were more
than just dramatic props.
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Conclusion: ‘Novissima hora’ revisited
690
695
700
705
710
715
720
725
The problematic relationship between drama and time in Gerontius has been raised
by Stephen Banfield in a provocative article that considers whether Gerontius might
be considered an unstaged opera.72 There is no shortage of operatic gestures in
Elgar’s score: Banfield draws attention to the mise en sce`ne of the dying man at the
opening of Part I, the Scarpia-like summons of the Priest at the end of that Part, and
the Parsifalian march that follows it. But, he concludes, there are major obstacles to
conceiving of Gerontius as an ersatz opera, on account of the essentially unoperatic
treatment of time in Part II. Whereas opera is characterized by temporal motion,
Gerontius is characterized by temporal stasis; this is irrespective of whether we view
Part II as an out-of-body experience, in which natural time is suspended, or as an
inner commentary by the Soul on the events of Part I.73 If we conceive of Gerontius
as an epic oratorio, however, one in which narrative is not bound by the linearity of
dramatic time, a possible solution may be offered to this.
Because its narrative is not subject to the unities of conventional drama, it is
possible for Part II to be both out-of-body experience and inner commentary: a
deepening of Part I rather than an addition to it. Instead of seeking a single dramatic
thread that runs through the whole work, we may instead locate parallel threads in
each part threads that, as we have seen, follow the same tonal trajectory and
consider the two parts opposite sides of the same coin. At certain points, however,
these two sides collide. Rehearsal figure 115 of Part II (see Example 5) sees the return
of the friends’ prayers for the dying soul: we hear the ‘Rescue him’ music from
rehearsal figure 63 of Part I (bass, rehearsal figure 115:3), and the ‘In the name of
angels and archangels’ music from rehearsal figure 72 of Part I (chorus, rehearsal
figure 115:5). It is a simple reminder that, although an hour of musical time has
elapsed since these passages last appeared, dramatic time has remained stationary.
These are the same prayers as before; their restatement therefore represents a
development of a single moment rather than a memory. We may view Part II as a
trope of Part I: the confirmatory role played by the choruses in Part I against the fears
and doubts of the dying man forms part of a dialectic of faith and doubt which the
Soul’s encounters with the demonic and the angelic choruses play out in a different
(but dramatically simultaneous) context in Part II. It is as if we are viewing the same
piece of sculpture, but from a different angle.
The relationship between the two Parts is reminiscent of what Lawrence Kramer
has described as ‘expressive doubling’: ‘a form of repetition in which alternative
versions of the same pattern define a cardinal difference in perspective’.74
Admittedly, the parallel is not an exact one. Expressive doubling is underpinned
72
73
74
Stephen Banfield, ‘The Dream of Gerontius at 100: Elgar’s Other Opera’, Musical Times, 141 (2000),
2331.
Ibid., 23, 279.
Lawrence Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice 18001900 (Berkeley, CA, 1990), 22.
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Example 5. Elgar, The Dream of Gerontius, Part II, rehearsal figures 114:7116:1: recurrence of ‘Rescue
him’ and ‘In the name of angels and archangels’ music.
730
by the Derridian idea of completing that which ‘at first seems complete in itself’ in a
way ‘that displaces but does not nullify the original term’: hardly the case in
Gerontius, where the prospect of divine judgment is established in Part I as a
necessary goal for the work, but is not realized until the end of Part II. Moreover,
expressive doubling, Kramer notes, is associated with the utopian aesthetics and
historical progress of early Romanticism: features notably absent from a work
associated more with post-Wagnerian decadence.75 On the other hand, one
75
Ibid., 24, 30; Kramer cites Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
(Baltimore, MD, 1976), 14164. For the connection between Gerontius and decadence, see n. 9 above.
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Example 5 (Continued)
735
manifestation of this utopianism was the transposition of the original term of an
expressive doubling ‘to a higher or deeper plane, a more brilliant or profound
register’.76 And it is perhaps this that best describes the relationship between Part I
and Part II: mortal dying is transposed into judgment within a heavenly realm that,
‘for a nineteenth century mystical Catholic [. . .] would probably [have] seem[ed]
more real and important’ and thus merit being depicted more brilliantly or
profoundly ‘than the mortal one’.77
76
77
Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice, 30.
McGuire, Elgar’s Oratorios, 133.
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Example 5 (Continued)
740
745
Such a transposition is particularly apparent in the treatment of what Banfield calls
the two ‘supremely important moments’ in the work: the death of Gerontius in Part
I and the Soul’s meeting with God in Part II.78 These moments occur at roughly the
same point in each Part, and, as we have already noted, are set to the same music
(‘Novissima hora’) and in the same key (F> minor). Here again Part II tropes Part I:
the process of physical dying in Part I is deepened psychologically to incorporate the
shame and unworthiness felt by the Soul when faced with divine judgment.
Moreover, this process of deepening continues at a musical level in the passage that
follows. Unlike its equivalent in Part I, the Priest’s ‘Proficiscere’ recitative, which
78
Banfield, ‘The Dream of Gerontius at 100’, 26.
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755
760
765
770
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AIDAN THOMSON
shifts somewhat abruptly from B= to the D major of the ensuing march (rehearsal
figure 70), the musical space after the final statement of ‘Novissima hora’ is resolved
much more slowly, culminating in an extensive dominant pedal (rehearsal figure
125) and a structural perfect cadence at the start of the Angel’s Farewell (rehearsal
figure 126). The Soul is thus permitted time to reflect on its predicament as it
prepares for its next journey.
The role played by the discourse on mysticism within the early criticism of
Gerontius is thus profoundly significant both culturally and aesthetically. The subject
matter of the work, and Elgar’s sensitive treatment of it, enabled critics like Volbach
and Hehemann to appropriate Gerontius as part of the artistic response to modernity
taking place in contemporary Germany, in which mysticism played an important
creative role, and thereby transplant Elgar’s piece from the backwater of the English
oratorio tradition to the heart of contemporary European music-making. Aesthetically, the centrality of mysticism to the plot of Gerontius gives us the chance to
reconsider the role of time and drama within oratorio, to conceive of it as an epic
rather than dramatic genre, and consequently to reinterpret the work as the
unfolding of two simultaneous events, in which Elgar, to paraphrase Schoenberg,
‘represents in slow motion everything that occurs during a single second of
maximum spiritual excitement, stretching it out to [an hour and a half]’.79 And
because we, the listeners, may thus hear the piece unfold differently, the cultural and
aesthetic associations of mysticism should be as relevant to our conception of the
piece as they were to the critics who heard it in Düsseldorf over a century ago.
ABSTRACT
775
780
The popularity in Britain of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius was triggered by the successful
reception of the work in Germany in December 1901 and May 1902. By examining some of
the writings on Elgar by German critics in this period, I explain that what may have
particularly have appealed to German audiences was the composer’s engagement with
mysticism, something that as well as being a distinct strand of German theology since
medieval times had acquired a new popularity among German artists in a number of fields, as
part of a reaction to the materialism of Wilhelmine Germany. Through a reading of the work
that takes into account both its Catholic theology and ideas of mysticism more generally, I
propose that the two Parts of the work should be conceived as taking place simultaneously,
rather than successively, and that the work is thus best understood as belonging to the genre
of epic rather than drama.
79
Arnold Schoenberg, ‘New Music: My Music’, Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg,
ed. Leonard Stein (London, 1975), 99106 (p. 105).

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`Proficiscere, anima Christiana`: Gerontius and German mysticism

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